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is softened by benevolence, and restrained by strong principle; when it is in the hands of a man who can use it and despise it, who can be witty and something much better than witty, who loves honour, justice, decency, good-nature, morality, and religion, ten thousand times better than wit; wit is then a beautiful and delightful part of our nature. There is no more interesting spectacle than to see the effects of wit upon the different characters of men; than to observe it expanding caution, relaxing dignity, unfreezing coldness, teaching age, and care, and pain, to smile. —extorting reluctant gleams of pleasure from melancholy,

TO MY MOTHER.

On the Twentieth Anniversary of our Separation.
FULL twenty years have passed away
(They seem now but a single day),
Since last I saw thee, mother.
But when I started on my way,
I truly did not mean to stay
So very long a time away,-
Away from thee, dear mother.

But I was then a wayward child,
And very young and very wild;

Alas! thou know'st it, mother.
And high my passions wine did foam,
I could no longer stay at home,
I wanted through the world to roam,
Away from thee, dear mother.

I knew not then what now I know,
That through the world where'er you go,
You find no second mother;
I thought then in my foolish mind,
With wild romantic notions blind,
That everywhere I was to find
Human hearts as warm and kind
As the one I left behind, -

As thine, thou kindest mother.
And so I rushed into the world,
By stormy, fiery passions whirled

Away from thee, dear mother;
And on the whirlwind did I ride,
Without a goal, without a guide,
Wandering far and wandering wide,
And always farther from thy side,
Thy side, my blessed mother.

I roamed and roamed the world around,
But what I sought I never found,
I never found it, mother.

I sought for nothing more nor less
Than an ideal happiness -
Sought Paradise in the wilderness,
And could not find it, mother.

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and charming even the pangs of grief. It is pleasant to observe how it penetrates through the coldness and awkwardness of society, gradually bringing men nearer together, and, like the combined force of wine and oil, giving every man a glad heart and a shining countenance. Genuine and innocent wit and humour like this is surely the flavour of the mind! Man could direct his ways by plain reason, and sup port his life by tasteless food; but God has given us wit, and flavour, and brightness, ad laughter, and perfumes, to enliven the days of man's pilgrimage, and to charm his pained steps over the burning marle.” ”

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But He whose name be ever blest,
Who loves us most and knows us best,
Took pity on me, mother;
And from his own effulgence bright
Into my soul's abysmal night,
He sent, imparting strength and sight,
A quickening ray of heavenly light

And peace- His peace, O mother. And now life's stormy days are past; My weary bark at last, at last,

Has found its haven, mother. By wild desires no more distrest, No passion now can heat my breast, Save one, which has outlived the restThe earliest, deepest and the best,— My love for thee, dear mother. But thou hast left this vale of tears, And winged thy way to better spheres, Far from thy child, O mother! The boundless gratitude I owe, The heart-warm love I fain would show, The tender cares I should bestow, My thousand debts of long ago I cannot pay them here below, I cannot pay thee, mother. But thou, so gentle and so mild, Thou wilt not spurn thy erring child, Thou wilt forgive me, mother. Behold, the days are running fast; I'm with the old already classed; Soon will the darksome vale be passed;" Then comes the hour when at last My spirit-arms around thee cast, I shall repay thee, mother! EMMANUEL VITALIS SCHERB, From Switzerland.

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From the Spectator, 25th March.

MR. LINCOLN.

or exultation, or popular arrogance, or sectarian fanaticism, or caste prejudice, visibly growing in force of character, in self-posses We all remember the animated eulogium sion, and in magnanimity, till in his last on General Washington which Lord Ma- short Message to Congress on the 4th of caulay passed parenthetically in his essay on March we can detect no longer the rude Hampden. "It was when to the sullen tyr- and illiterate mould of a village lawyer's anny of Laud and Charles had succeeded thought, but find it replaced by a grasp of the fierce conflict of sects and factions am- principle, a dignity of manner, and a solembitious of ascendency or burning for revenge, nity of purpose, which would have been unit was when the vices and ignorance which worthy neither of Hampden nor of Cromthe old tyranny had engendered threatened well, while his gentleness and generosity of the new freedom with destruction, that Eng- feeling toward his foes are almost greater land missed the sobriety, the self-command, than we should expect from either of them. the perfect soundness of judgment, the per- It seems to us, we confess, a discreditable and fect rectitude of intention to which the his- hardly intelligible thing that the pro-Southtory of revolutions furnishes no parallel, or ern English journals which are exulting with furnishes a parallel in Washington alone." such vehement delight over the squalid vulIf that high eulogium was fully earned, as it garity of the new Vice-President's drunken was, by the first great President of the inaugural — forgetting that both the squalor United States, we doubt if it has not been as and the vulgarity of thought are the legacy well earned by the Illinois peasant-proprietor left by the southern slaveholders to the and "village lawyer" whom, by some divine "mean whites" of the border States, of whom inspiration, or providence the Republican Mr. Johnson, journeyman tailor of Tennessee, Caucus of 1860 substituted for Mr. Seward as is the representative, should not recognize their nominee for the President's chair. No the calm and grand impartiality displayed, doubt he has in many ways had a lighter task even though it be by a foe, in the President's than Washington, for he had not at least to recent weighty address, - by far the noblest produce a Government out of chaos, but only which any American President has yet utto express and execute the purposes of a tered to an American Congress. Yet the people far more highly organized for political fact is that its finest sentences have been life than that with which Washington had to deliberately distorted from their true and deal. But without the advantages of Wash- obvious meaning into the expression of a ington's education or training, Mr. Lincoln bloodthirsty spirit, the farthest possible from was called from a humble station at the open- their real tenor. After confessing candidly ing of a mighty civil war to form a Govern- the complicity of the North in the guilt of ment out of a party in which the habits and slavery, and the righteousness of the judgtraditions of official life did not exist. Find- ment by which North and South alike suffer ing himself the object of Southern abuse so its retribution, Mr. Lincoln went on to say, fierce and so foul that in any man less pas-"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, sionless it would long ago have stirred up an that this mighty scourge of war may speedily implacable animosity, mocked at for his of- pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue ficial awkwardness, and denounced for his till all the wealth piled by the bondsman's steadfast policy by all the democratic sec- two hundred and fifty years of unrequited tion of the loyal States, tried by years of toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of failure before that policy achieved a single blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by great success, further tried by a series of another drawn with the sword, as was said successes so rapid and brilliant that they three thousand years ago so still it must be would have puffed up a smaller mind and said, that the judgments of the Lord are overset its balance, embarrassed by the boast- true and righteous altogether." Will it be fulness of his people and of his subordinates, believed that English journals have garbled no less than by his own inexperience in his this sentence by citing out of it the hypothetirelations with foreign States, beset by fanat- cal clause, "Yet if it [the war] continues unics of principle on one side who would pay til the wealth piled by bondmen by 250 no attention to his obligations as a constitu- years' unrequited toil be sunk, and until tional ruler, and by fanatics of caste on the every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall other who were not only deaf to the claims be paid with another drawn by the sword," of justice but would hear of no policy large without either the introductory or the final enough for a revolutionary emergency, Mr. words, decapitated and mutilated of its Lincoln has persevered through all without conclusion, simply in order to prove ever giving way to anger, or despondency, Mr. Lincoln's bloodthirstiness? They

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might almost as fairly cite from the psalm the words, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem!" minus the clause, "let my right hand forget her cunning," to prove that the Psalmist was deliberately contemplating the renunciation of his patriotic duties and ties. But these are the critics who do not wish to understand Mr. Lincoln, who wish indeed to misunderstand him.

If any one would apprehend truly the character of Mr. Lincoln, he should compare the growth of his mind from the time of his Illinois campaign against Judge Douglas in 1859 through the period of his first Presidency to the present time. What forces itself upon any one who will do so, and compare what he finds there with what Mr. Lincoln himself called in the canss against Mr. Douglas his "poor, lean, lank face," a face not rich in expression of any kind, but careworn, apparently with honest, sagacious vigilance, the kind of furrowed, somewhat weazened face we should expect in a prairie trapper or bee-hunter, -is the curiously strong habit Mr. Lincoln has of looking on political forces as he would upon the great forces of the wind or soil, with a certain prescience of what is coming, but without the slightest wish to hasten its arrival by a day, or any desire indeed except to stand aside and watch till the moment for inevitable action is forced upon him. Even in the personal part of his political strife you can see the same spirit. The invective of his opponents affects him only as a sort of hailstorm which in the state of the political weather was to be expected and must be endured. You feel at once

"As if the man had set his face In many a solitary place Against the wind and open sky,”

and as if he had thus got into the habit of treating sunshine and storm, natural or political, rather as one who knows that this is part of his appointed lot, than with the personal restlessness of hope or fear. Thus in his controversy with Mr. Douglas in 1859, all his efforts are devoted to impressing on that eminent politician the wide difference between his own prescience, his own instinct that the American Union could not long hold out without either the Slave power encroaching on the free or the free upon the Slave, and any wish to precipitate that contest. Mr. Douglas would not believe that a man who thought thus did not intend aggression on slavery. Mr. Lincoln urged in effect that because an experienced shepherd 'predicts a thunderstorm (which he may fear

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instead of desiring) he does not give his aid to the thunderstorm, nor does the prediction make him a partizan in the matter. He, for his part, was bound to say that he thought the extension of slavery must be resisted at any cost, but he was also most anxious to protect the constitutional rights given to the Slave States in the matter. He could not, he said, look on Slavery as Mr. Douglas did, as a local matter of no more importance than "the oyster laws of Virginia or the cranberry laws of Indianna.' He thought the Slave laws had more of aggressiveness and natural proselytism about them than either oyster laws or cranberry laws; still that was only his own opinion as a political weather-prophet. All he insisted on was the duty of resisting the advance and growth of a force whose power he feared as malign for the whole Union. In its then dimensions he would protect and sanction it and accord it every constitutional guarantee, but he did not believe it would be content to keep within its then dimensions. He looked at it as an Arctic navigator would look on pack-ice, not as an English politician looks at the principles of the opposite party. Two years later, when so unexpectedly summoned to assume the Presidency of the United States, he reasons with the Secessionists in the same tone, appealing to the great verdict of political experiment, not asking them to give up slavery, but, if they had real confidence in it, to show that confidence by leaving it to its natural persuasiveness over the mind of the people, to the natural strength which it would derive from the providential care of God. "Why should there not be a patient confidence of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? In our present differences is either party without faith of being in the right? If the Almighty ruler of nations, with His eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth and that justice will surely prevail by the judgment of this great tribunal, the American people." The plea was no unreal pretence of argument. Mr. Lincoln was speaking from a faith so deep in himself, that had he been in the minority (as he was two years before )he would have accepted the test. "If this thing be not of God it will come to naught," he had said with profound sincerity in explaining his own disapprobation of slavery; and he thought his opponents might have faith enough to say it too. And for himself, though he had now accepted the post of pilot to the State, he was almost ludicrously willing to abide by his own

slow, patient, naturalistic habit of waiting for a solution. All he could make up his mind to do was to say, "The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government." He could do no less without treachery, for he was trustee for those places. He could do no more without precipitating action, and he would not precipitate action. He wished to see the storm burst before he was willing to decide upon his duty. It might even yet drift by if he did not do too much. "To hold, occupy, and possess," that was his only clear duty. The war once declared by his opponents, our readers know how he treated the slavery question, not from any doubt that slavery was the root of the whole struggle, but from a profound doubt whether he was justified in anticipating the divine moment for its extinction. He was not placed there as God's instrument to put down slavery, but as His instrument for administering the Government of the United States "on the basis of the constitution," and the question might settle itself far better than he could settle it. Slowly he was forced, bit by bit, to see that the one duty was involved in the other, and as he saw he accepted it; but even then his only fear was lest he should interfere too much in the great forces which were working out their own end. He was chosen, as men usually are, to do that which he was most fearful of doing, not because he did not see that it was a great work, but because he only very gradually opened his eyes to its being a work in which he, with his defined duties, had any right to meddle. And now he speaks of it in just the same spirit as a great natural process, not entrusted to him or dependent on him, of which no one can foresee the course and the exact issue. Both North and South, he says, were equally confident in the justice of their, cause, and appealed to God to justify that confidence. He has not justified either of them wholly. "The prayers of both could not be answered, that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes."

Mr. Lincoln presents more powerfully than any man that quality in the American mind which, though in weak men it becomes boastfulness, is not really this in root, but a strange, an almost humiliated trust in the structural power of that political Nature which, without any statesman's co-operation, is slowly building up a free nation or free nations on that great continent, with an advance as steady as that of the rivers or the tides. It is the phase of political thought

most opposite to, though it is sometimes compared with, the Cæsarism that is growing up on the European side of the Atlantic.

The Emperor of the French thinks the Imperial organ of the nation almost greater than the nation, certainly an essential part of it. It is men like Mr. Lincoln who really believe devoutly, indeed too passively, in the "logic of events," but then they think the logic of events the Word of God. The Cæsar thinks also of the logic of events, but he regards himself not as its servant but its prophet. He makes events when the logic would not appear complete without his aid, points the slow logic of the Almighty with epigram, fits the unrolling history with showy, rhetorical dénouements, cuts the knot of ravelled providences, and stills the birththroes of revolution with the chloroform of despotism. Mr. Lincoln is a much stupider and slower sort of politician, but we doubt if any politician has ever shown less personal ambition and a larger power of trust.

Correspondence of the Boston Journal. THE PRESIDENT'S ENTRY INTO RICHMOND, I was standing upon the bank of the river, viewing the scene of desolation, when a boat pulled by twelve sailors came up stream. It contained President Lincoln and his son, Admiral Porter, Capt. Penrose of the army, Captain A. H. Adams of the navy, Lieut. W. W. Clemens of the signal corps. Somehow the negroes on the bank of the river ascertained that the tall man wearing a black hat was President Lincoln. There was a sudden shout. An officer who had just picked up fifty negroes to do work on the dock, found himself alone. They left work, and crowded round the President. As he approached I said to a coloured woman,

"There is the man who made you free." What, massa?”

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"That is President Lincoln."
"Dat President Linkum?"
"Yes."

She gazed at him a moment, clapped her hands, and jumped straight up and down, shouting "Glory, glory, glory!" till her voice was lost in the universal cheer.

There was no carriage near, so the President, leading his son, walked three-quarters of a mile up to Gen. Weitzel's headquarters

Jeff Davis's mansion. What a spectacle it was! Such a hurly-burly—such wild, indescribable ecstatic joy I never witnessed. A coloured man acted as guide. Six sailors, wearing their round blue caps and

One coloured woman, standing in a doorway, as the President passed along the sidewalk, shouted, "Thank you, dear Jesus, for this! thank you, Jesus!" Another standing by her side was clapping her hands and shouting, "Bless de Lord!"

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short jackets and bagging pants, with navy have been for the Union through all the carbines, was the advance guard. Then war. came the President and Admiral Porter, The President then took a ride through flanked by the officers accompanying him, the city, accompanied by Admiral Porter, and the correspondent of The Journal, then Gens. Shepley, Weitzel, and other officers. six more sailors with carbines-twenty of Such is the simple narrative of this momenus all told — amid a surging mass of men, wo- tous event; but no written page or illumimen and children, black, white, and yellow, nated canvas can give the reality of the running, shouting, dancing, swinging their event- the enthusiastic bearing of the peocaps, bonnets and handkerchiefs. The sol- ple- the blacks and poor whites who have diers saw him and swelled the crowd, cheer- suffered untold horrors during the war, their ing in wild enthusiasm. All could see him, demonstrations of pleasure, the shouting, he was so tall, so conspicuous. dancing, the thanksgivings to God, the mention of the name of Jesus- as if President Lincoln were next to the son of God in their affections-the jubilant cries, the countenances beaming with unspeakable joy, the tossing up of caps, the swinging of arms of a motley crowd-some in rags, some barefoot, some wearing pants of Union blue, and coats of Confederate gray, ragamuffins in dress, through the hardships of war, but yet of stately bearing- men in heart and soul-free men henceforth and forever, their bonds cut asunder in an hour-men from whose limbs the chains fell yesterday morning, men who through many weary years have prayed for deliverance -who have asked sometimes if God were dead — who, when their children were taken from them and sent to the swamps of South Carolina and the cane brakes of Louisiana, cried to God for help and cried in vain; who told their sorrows to Jesus and asked for help, but who had no helper-men who have been whipped, scourged, robbed, imprisoned, for no crime. All of these things must be kept in remembrance if we would have the picture complete.

A coloured woman snatched her bonnet from her head whirled it in the air, screaming with all her might, "God bless you, Massa Linkum !"

A few white women looking out from the houses waved their handkerchief. One lady in a large and elegant building looked awhile, and then turned away her head as if it was a disgusting sight.

President Lincoln walked in silence, acknowledging the salutes of officers and soldiers and of the citizens, black and white! It was the man of the people among the people. It was the great deliverer, meeting the delivered. Yesterday morning the majority of the thousands who crowded the streets and hindered our advance were slaves. Now they were free, and beheld him who had given them their liberty. Gen. Shepley met the President in the street, and escorted him to Gen. Weitzel's quarters. Major Stevens, hearing that the President was on his way, suddenly summoned a detachment of the Massachusetts 4th Cavalry, and cleared the

way.

After a tedious walk, the mansion of Jeff Davis was reached. The immense crowd swept round the corner of the street and packed the space in front. Gen. Weitzel received the President at the door. Cheer upon cheer went up from the excited multitude, two-thirds of whom were coloured.

No wonder that President Lincoln, who has a child's heart, felt his soul stirred; that the tears almost came to his eyes as he heard the thanksgivings to God and Jesus, and the blessings uttered for him from thankful hearts. They were true, earnest, and heartfelt expressions of gratitude to God. There are thousands of men in Richmond to-night who would lay down their lives for President Lincoln- their great deliverer, their best friend on earth. He came among them unheralded, without pomp or parade. He walkThe officers who had assembled were pre-ed through the streets as if he were only a sented to the President in the reception private citizen, and not the head of a mighty room of the mansion. nation. He came not as a conqueror, not with Judge Campbell, once on the Supreme bitterness in his heart, but with kindness. He bench of the United States, who became a came as a friend, to alleviate sorrow and traitor, came in and had a brief private in- suffering-to rebuild what has been deterview with the President in the drawing- stroyed. CARLETON.

room. Other citizens called those who

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